#005 Creating Long Term Business Value with Richard Banfield

Jay Owen: On this episode, I interview Richard Banfield. He’s the CEO of a company called Fresh Tilled Soil in Boston. They are a user interface design firm. They create work for companies like Intel and Microsoft and GE, really masters in their field. Richard’s also written three books and a couple of them- specifically the Design Leadership book that he wrote is kinda similar in concept to what I’m wanting to do with this podcast and that is gather together ideas, in his case specifically in the design industry, around how to build a business that is successful over time and that’s a great resource, if you haven’t checked it out, it’s called Design Leadership. I’d encourage you to read it.

Richard has a very interesting experience. He has been an investor with over 21 startups. He spent some time in the South African Defense Force, and he’s very candid and open about seasons of his life where he spent a lot of time working, maybe even overworking sometimes, which sometimes I call myself a recovering workaholic. Many of us have been through that if you’ve run a business before, and Richard is very transparent and honest with some of those things, and I think it was really helpful and good reminders for me to take away from this interview. I hope it is helpful for you as well. Here’s that conversation with Richard.

Jay Owen: What I’d love to do, Richard, is just hear a little bit from you on your history and how you got started in business to begin with.

Richard: Sure, well thanks for inviting me onto your show. I really like this topic, so double as excited as I would have been normally. I got started as an entrepreneur pretty early. My dad was an entrepreneur, so I think it was in the genes or in the water or something, but we experimented with a couple of things when I was younger, a small t-shirt company, and eventually I made beds which I think was my first formal business, the futon bases that were fashionable at the time, and then I decided that business wasn’t really my thing.

I had a stint in the army. I did a degree in Biology. I actually also studied business, but I didn’t really enjoy it much. I found the theory of business super boring, and I’m sure most people do when you’re doing business economics and accounting. It just doesn’t seem that cool at all. But during my time at school when I was trying to pay student loans and just keep myself afloat, I had a couple of jobs and one of those jobs was running a small design company that I started with a friend, and I just really enjoyed it. I enjoyed the creative process. I had a pretty strong art background, which I know is not exactly a lead into design, but I was able to turn my artistic talents into things that would help people, so packaging products and making a very simple way of science and one thing led to another and over the last 20 years I’ve had four or five businesses, mostly in the service industries, and all of them have been focused on web technologies, but yeah, that’s how I got to where I am today.

Jay Owen: And how long have you been with Fresh Tilled Soil?

Richard: Quite awhile now. So I started this company 12 years ago … just over 12 years ago, and in line with your topic of conversation, companies that are built to last, the previous companies that I’d created I’d built specifically to either flip those, in other words create value and then either sell them to somebody else or move on, but at some point I got really tired of that idea. I got tired of dealing with investors and dealing with the anxiety of creating something that truly was selfishly value but not really valuable to your customer, and I wanted to do something different, so- Fresh Tilled Soil was never really conceived as a longterm business. I wanted to create longterm value in some form, and that’s what we’ve created.

Jay Owen: Your work is really amazing, definitely something our team looks up to and so I really appreciate your leadership in all those areas. One of the things I’ve been trying to do on this show is connect with other leaders who have been in business in that kind of decade plus because I think there’s a difference between- a lot of times there’s a mentality of everybody wants to get rich quick. They want to lose weight quick. They want everything to happen overnight.

Richard: Yeah, yeah.

Jay Owen:And to some extent business is kind of no different. Everybody wants to be the instant success, and I’ve heard a few guys say, kind of jokingly, “Yeah after 20 years of busting my tail then I was an overnight success.” And so I’m curious for you, as you’ve grown the business, and grown a team, what kind of things stood out as difficult in those early years as you start to build a team? I know for me … I worked by myself for a very long time, and it’s very different to work by yourself, and then it’s different to work with contractors. Then it’s a whole different thing to actually have employees and a team, so I’d love some of your thoughts and insights on how you built a team over time, things that have worked and things that haven’t worked.

Richard: Wow. I’m not sure we have all the time for that, but … I think the most important thing to realize when you’re building a business over a long period of time, or if you intend on having a business for a long period of time, is that that business is going to change significantly during the lifetime or that life cycle, and certainly you as a founder also need to be part of that change and that evolution. So I think the thing that struck me the most is the company that I set out to create in the early days is very, very, very different from the company that we’ve had over the years. And that’s because there’s this natural evolution that happens. Companies go through cycles. They go through change. They tend to find value in new areas. They obviously need to adapt to the environmental and market changes that are going on. Certainly companies like ours, where we’re dealing with technology, that’s a moving target, right? So every day is slightly different where you’ve got new technologies and new platforms and different pressures from the outside world.

So you need to have this open-mindedness that you’re going to change with the business, and the business is gonna grow, and that also means you’re gonna change how you sell, how you market, how you hire. You outgrow certain things, so you may even outgrow the people that you’re working with. You may outgrow the vendors that you work with, so if you’ve got an accountant or a lawyer that you started out with, you may even outgrow them. Maybe they’re not able to take those steps with you, and I think what goes along with that is that these changes happen in a somewhat dramatic way, so it’s not very even. It’s not like a straight line of change. They tend to go in steps, so you’ll have long periods of almost nothingness, stasis if you want to call it that, where things are just cruising along, and you’re doing what you need to do, and then something changes, maybe it’s an external market thing although that doesn’t tend to be the biggest issue with small companies, but most often it’s something internal.

So maybe you figure out that you’re really good at one thing, or you’re really bad at another thing, or that there’s a partnership that’s not working, or that there’s a market that you see as a new opportunity, and then you need to disrupt your company from the inside and having that in mind, having these steps in mind, gives you a sense of control in a very ambiguous world. But, of course, it doesn’t necessarily give you the answers. It just means you’re a little bit more prepared when the change happens.

Jay Owen:One of the things that I’m always curious about in those scenarios is anybody who’s been around for a long time has experienced those kind of disruptions whether they were external, or internal, or internal that you almost had to create. I actually have a friend who runs a counseling business, and part of their mission statement says something like “to entice and disrupt,” and I told them originally that it sounds kind of abrasive, but when you really think through it, it makes a lot of sense.

I’m curious from your perspective, when you enter those periods where things are changing, sometimes quickly especially in technology, how have you communicated and gone through those scenarios in ways that have helped to continue the companies to survive because what happens with some folks is they’re not able to make it through those periods and they fall apart in the process.

Richard: That’s a really good question. I think communicating with your team and with your clients and with the market in general, just for the community that you work with, is really, really, really important. I haven’t always been that good at it, so I’m not gonna pretend that my advice would be any better than anybody else’s. The lessons that I’ve learned have been to over-communicate as much as possible, so providing the lead up to that change is going to be important, and I often think of myself in the role of a lobbyist where- because it’s my business and because I have the CEO role and ownership of division, I’ve also got to prepare people who are maybe not ready for that change and not as visionary as I am. That’s does not mean they don’t have visionary skills. It just means that their jobs are different. They are doing different things. They’re focused on different things. I have to be very sensitive to that, and often bring that to their attention long before the change even happens.

I’ve got better at doing that. I used to do the big reveal thing which all designers know is terrible in general as a rule. I used to do that for the business where I’d walk in and go “Great. Here’s a keynote presentation. Here are all the things that are gonna change. I’m really excited about it. Let’s go and do it.” And then there’d just be a room full of faces going “What the hell did this guy just talk about? Like, I don’t even understand what this means or why we’re doing this. There’s no context for it.” So the big reveal is no longer part of my story.

There might be a team meeting where you talk about these things in general, but before that team meeting even happens, there’s 20 other conversations that need to happen. You need to go to meet with all of your team members especially the folks that are going to be affected most by it and talk to them about the change and let them give you feedback. Give them a couple of days to mull over it, and get their insights and feedback, and then draw from that to improve your approach. It doesn’t mean that you can’t make quick decisions; it just means that you have to be a little bit more thoughtful about it. I’ve discovered that my general approach of announcing things and hoping that everybody is gonna be really cool with it and as excited as I am is really not the way that most people behave and generally they tend to take change a little bit more deliberately, and I need to be aware of that and be sensitive to that.

Jay Owen:I think sometimes there’s this mentality that somehow we communicate differently at work than we do in any other aspect of life. While there may be some truth to that, I think there’s this reality that we’re all human beings, and we’re all people, and we all have certain expectations going into any situation and the more clearly some of those things are communicated, especially in times of big transitions, it makes a big difference.

Richard: Exactly.

Jay Owen: One of the things I like to talk about, because I think it’s one of the most misunderstood topics in business- you open the Design Leadership book with a chapter on culture. I feel like a lot of times there’s this belief that culture just means throwing a few bean bag tables and a foosball table in your office and all the sudden you have culture. I’d just be kind of curious to hear your thoughts as it relates to things that you had in that book or even additional ideas you’ve had since then on creating company culture and kind of reinforcing positive culture that may already exist.

Richard: I think what I learned from the interviews during the Design Leadership book was that culture is very different for everybody, so there is no one-size-fits-all, and certainly no playbook for culture. The things that may be consistent are that culture is very, very differently part of the founder’s personality, so if you’re a small company, and when I say small company, I say anything from a handful of people, like four or five people, all the way to 30 or 40 people, the founders’ personalities definitely influence the culture more than just about anything else. If you’ve got a culture that is not particularly- if your personality is not particularly- I don’t know, I’m thinking of Uber right now, and I’m thinking just how they screwed that up with the founder’s personality being aggressive, abrasive person who may or may not have actually had sexist issues. I think that permeates in the culture. Your personality as a founder is very much part of the culture of the organization. That doesn’t mean that every aspect of your personality is gonna be the same. It just means that you are going to be the biggest reason for that culture to have the existence and the personality that it does, so that’s an important thing to know- be self-actualized enough to know that if you are a bad communicator then maybe there will be a culture of poor communication. That’s something that I discovered. I’m really good at the presentation communication, but I’m not necessarily good at the detail presentation kind of communication. I often leave out details, so I’ll present the big picture but I’ll leave out the details and that somehow can find it’s way into the culture of the company.

The second thing is that culture isn’t about the bean bags and the foosball tables, but that stuff still has an influence. The way that you set up your physical space and the way that you conduct yourself from a behavior point of view will also influence how people pitch up at work and how they behave. If you pitch up a work in sneakers and T-shirts, then that’s really what you’re signaling to everybody. You’re saying this is what the culture is. If you are taking a break in the middle of the day to play on your Xbox, then that’s the culture that you’re creating. If you have those things in your environment and you have a physical space that allows for that, then that’s what you’re gonna see. If you have a remote team, then how you conduct yourself remotely is also going to be an important part of the culture of the organization.

I think one of the challenges of running a remote organization, for most of us, because a lot of us have distributed teams, is bringing those teams together in a physical intimate way to show everybody what those human beings are really life in person. That requires time, money, and effort, and you have to make that effort in order for that stuff to stick because, like you just pointed out, human beings are still human beings, and they still value the intimacy of connections and understanding that doesn’t come from just a Slack conversation or an email. They have to be in touch with each other in their physical presences in order to know each other better.

Jay Owen: I got to have a conversation with you awhile back over lunch, and that was actually a time period that really helped encourage and push me forward with our agency. I think we had five people at the time, maybe six, and there’s 12 now. We were totally distributed for 16 years. Now much of that was just me by myself, but even the years that we had team members, they were all actually still local, but we didn’t have a physical office. As we started to move into more strategy work, we actually put in an office about a year and a half ago, and it’s been really interesting transition especially as it relates to culture on how that’s happened because I really value my lifestyle and time and freedom and time with my kids and everything else, as did a lot of the other team. But now as we grow the team, keeping some of the same things in place, while also having a certain amount of structure and order to remain profitable as a company, has been an interesting transition, but it’s also been kind of challenging and fun as we work through it too.

Richard: Right. Right.

Jay Owen: I know you do all kinds of physical stuff. You do a lot of cycling, right?

Richard: Yeah, I do.

Jay Owen: And so, I was thinking about personal growth. I’ve done a little bit of cycling, not nearly as much as you. My wife and I have done some triathlons. She did a half marathon. She’s much more fit than I am- sorry, not a half marathon, a half Ironman. She’s much more fit than I am. I’m curious on the personal growth side- for me it’s not always about needing a break from business necessarily because I like what I do. I don’t hate Mondays. I don’t want my team to hate Mondays, but we all still need some kind of an outlet to separate and think through. For you, whether it’s cycling or something else, how do you find time for that? How are you intentional in your process for setting up a place for you to be able to think and grow personally outside of your team or companies?

Richard: I think the keyword is that it’s intentional. When you’re starting out your business, especially when you’re young, you tend to prioritize the work stuff over everything else, and family, and exercise, and general health takes a backseat. I know, because I’ve been there. I’ve worked 16-, 17-, 20-hour days.

My first business was an international business, and I used to sleep with a cell phone next to me on the pillow. It would ring, and one in the morning, I’d pick it up and it’d be a call from New York or whatever, and at the time, I was basically living all over the world, and I’d just start talking as if I’d been awake the whole time. I didn’t want anybody to believe that they were- we ever slept. That was just absolutely ridiculous. There was no time to do anything else, and it cost a lot in terms my mental acuity and just general health. Everything suffered, and I persisted with that behavior for a long time until ultimately led to- many years later, it actually led to a divorce, and my family was broken up because of that.

It really struck home to me that you can’t work yourself into success. That just doesn’t happen at all. The mythologies that are created in the media about people working long hours, it’s just total BS. There are very few examples of people who work that many hours and have the harmony in their life that they’re looking for. In fact, there was a series of tweets from Elon Musk yesterday saying just how absolutely miserable periods of his life are. He’s incredibly exhausted and upset a lot of the time which doesn’t sound that great. I mean, yeah, you’re creating these amazing companies, but at the cost of what, and at the cost of your family and your future, possibly your health.

I think intentional is important. You have to make time for it. What I do is I schedule out things like exercise and time with the family into my calendar long before anything else happens, so months and months before. I’ll have an eight-month training schedule for cycling races or something like that, and then I work my work schedule around that. Granted, I do that stuff during a period where it doesn’t really interfere with anybody, so I normally get up really early and do the exercising when it’s nice and quiet and nobody really needs me. That’s fine. Time with your family- we have a rule at the office that you’re not obliged to respond to email and Slack after hours and on weekends. If you want to, that’s fine, but you’re not obliged to do that. That just gives you much more sanity, and it gives you a lot more energy during the week when you can do the things that you need to do.

Instead of trying to work a 20-hour week at half-energy level, you’re actually working a shorter week, but you’ve got a much higher energy level and your focus and your attention and your performance is much better as well. It’s generally the best thing you can do is to set yourself up with an exercise schedule and a healthy eating schedule and time to do whatever you need to do whether you meditate or pray or whatever it is that you need to do. You just need to make time for that stuff first and then build your work schedule around it. You’ll be amazed at how quickly you adapt to that and how quickly it actually works.

Jay Owen: I just love that advice and transparency. I think that we sometimes live in this culture that glorifies that hustle, and I just believe that you can hustle the business and not need to do it for 90 hours a week. Even some of the folks that I like to follow- you can’t look at somebody like Elon Musk, clearly the guy is a genius as it comes to business, but you have to ask the question like, but for what, in some areas, or even another guy who I really enjoy following, and I love a lot of his stuff, Gary Vaynerchuk, but he’s the same kind of thing. He loves to brag that he was out working at five in the morning and am still working at 11 o’clock at night.

For me, I have five little kids that want to see me, so this morning, I got up and made them breakfast before I left. Then I came into work, and I was here, and I’ll work a full day, and I think that’s okay. I’ve been able to grow a business 18 years in a row doing that, maybe not as fast as I could have otherwise, but I think some of that hustle life story is a little bit of a fantasy that’s probably less helpful for people than the advice of what you were saying which is blocking time for other parts of life because we’re people that need more than just work I think. Richard: Yeah, I think it’s all relative as well. Like I said earlier, when your business is going through these different stages, each of those steps is gonna look different. If you’re a 20-something-year-old and you’re not in a very committed relationship, you don’t have kids, you don’t have a mortgage, you can do those things. You can work very long hours. Maybe that’s all you want to do. Maybe that’s what you desire to spend your time on, but I think, as you make commitments to other people, then you also need to understand that those commitments go beyond just paying a mortgage. As a provider, as a husband, as a father, your job is not to just pay the bills. You also need to be spending other quality moments with your family and doing things that are important for their mental health and their emotional health. Things change, and it’s okay to change with that. You don’t always have to be the Gary V. throughout your life. I think now the problem with Gary V. is that he’s set himself up to be that guy and that’s his persona. Now if he stops being that guy, he kind of breaks the brand if you know what I mean.

Jay Owen: Right. Right.

Richard: He’s set himself up in this way that he- it’s unsustainable. At some point, he won’t be able to do it. It’s just physically impossible to do, so at some point it’ll just be harder and harder for him to do it, but then he’s kind of painted himself into this corner.

Jay Owen: I think that’s a good point. I think that both personality and season of life both make a big impact as to how much work is enough work and how much is too much, and that’s gonna vary from person to person as well. I’ve had plenty of seasons where I’m probably working way too much and probably somewhere not working enough, but it is about trying to find what works within your own space and where you are in life. I think the big thing for me is- for anybody, just taking that time to sit back and ask the question, “Is this where I should be right now?” Because, I think sometimes, it’s just “Hey, I’m just gonna keep hustling, keep hustling it,” business all the time, and not ask the question of “Where am I doing person- how I’m doing personally? How am I doing spiritually? How am I doing with other people?” Whatever those things may be. I think sometimes just taking a minute to ask that question can have a lot of value.

Richard: Yeah, and I think one- just last point on that, I think the idea of balance, there’s this work-life balance conversation. That’s also kind of garbage as well because then what it does is it makes you think that you need to be doing equal amounts of effort across all of those different domains all the time. That’s really not the case. I think the word you should be seeking is harmony. Are you in harmony with your life even when you need to do a little bit extra? Like you said, there are weeks or months, seasons when you’re doing more of one thing and less of another thing, but that’s okay. Overall, does your life have harmony? Does year have harmony? It doesn’t have to be an exactly balanced day or week or month, day after day, week after week, month after month.

Jay Owen: Yeah, I couldn’t agree with that more. I love that word harmony for use. I always kind of joke that it’s a little bit like a blender and sometimes you need a little more spinach, and sometimes you need a little more strawberries, but it just depends on where you’re at. Richard: Exactly.

Jay Owen: So we’ve only got a few more minutes left, and what I always kind of like to wrap up with is to get some insight from you with regards to- on a knowledge base, whether it’s in your industry or just personal growth, where do you find resources, whether it’s books or blogs or podcasts, that have really influenced you and helped you continue to grow individually over time, that’s helped you in business and other areas as well?

Richard: I get the knowledge that I need from just about every source that is possible. I should say that I don’t read as much as I listen to books, so I have an Audible account, and I listen books a lot when I’m traveling in my car or when I’m just traveling in general. I can get through about anything from 35 to 45 books a year. I read some blog posts although I’m quite judicious about what I read. I don’t listen or read any news at all. I haven’t listened to the news or read any news for almost 20 years now. I don’t have a- I have a Facebook account, but I don’t use it. I try and avoid social media when it’s purely social. I’ll use Twitter because it’s more business focused, and I have a very clear idea about what I can follow. I can mute people, and just follow the things that I want to follow. That way I can avoid the general political crap, and just garbage that’s on most social media.

Podcasts, a few, the Bureau is one of them, and a couple of others. I think also the most important thing is you must go to the source, so what you’re doing- you may know this already, by writing a book or creating a podcast, what you’re doing is you’re actually going to the source of the knowledge. If you’ve read a book, the best thing to do is then find the author of the book and go and talk to them and ask them questions. Or if you’re writing a book, that is a way to go to the source, so with both Design Leadership and Product Leadership, the purpose behind those books was originally to gain selfish knowledge. I wanted to know more and reach out to these people and understand what they understood, so you’re going directly to the source instead of getting it second or third hand. By doing so, that allowed me to aggregate a lot insights and knowledge that I thought would be useful to other people and that’s ultimately what happened is that, by doing that, you’ve created a repository of all this awesome stuff that you can share in the form of a book or podcast or any other thing.

I think the primary thing is to remain curious. The second thing is you don’t really have to have a single source of knowledge. You can jump around. You can also change as your business changes, so you may go to different sources as your business gets better and better at what it does or as it changes its needs. I think the final thing about knowledge is that you also need to understand that, at some point, development of your own understanding and your own intuition is important, so you’ve got to find a way to do that at the same time. Don’t always look externally. In fact, what I’ve started doing now is I’m taking a break from reading. For several weeks, I’m not going to listen to podcasts, or read or do anything. I just wanted to wallow in what I’ve learned over the last couple of years. I’ve read a lot of books. I want to go over my notes, and see what I went through there, and just remind myself what are the lessons that I’ve learned as opposed to just keep adding- “Hey, there’s a new book. There’s a new bestseller. I’ve quickly got to add that to my list” and read that for fear of missing out. I’d rather just kind of step back and say “Well, actually, what have I learned? What is going on here?”

What I very often do is I’ll read a book and then I write a one-page summary of what I’ve learned from that book. Then I’ll go back and reread that, and see if it is in fact something that is useful to me, or whether it’s something that maybe I’ve transcended and there’s something else that I want to go and explore beyond that.

Jay Owen: That’s great advice. I love the “go to the source” and then the “no news” thing is actually something I started doing years ago as well. I found that I was at a point where I was- I realized that I was constantly stressed out and worried and fearful and then I isolated that the source of that was watching a lot of cable news.

Richard: Yeah.

Jay Owen: I just shut it off. I was like I’m not going to watch anymore. I’m not gonna listen to the radio, and I’m really rarely even gonna read or watch stuff on the Internet because it’s all just so sensationalized that you’re not getting real information. You’re just getting a lot of opinions that, to some extent, just stirred me up emotionally in ways that weren’t valuable. I did the same thing, and I think that’s incredible advice. Richard: Nothing good can come out of reading the comments, right?

Jay Owen: Yeah, exactly. Just one last thing, and this is kind of a selfish question, I’ve kind of joked about this podcast to some extent. I told my wife, I was like, “Look if nobody even listens to this thing, it’s gonna be super valuable for me, and I’m really thankful for the people who’ve taken time to chat.” So one last selfish question, the book that I’m working on is the first book I’ve ever written, so I’m just curious, from somebody who’s been involved in quite a few writing projects before, any particular insights or wisdom you could share with me in that process which I’m kind of just now embarking on?

Richard: Yeah, I think that the lessons that I’ve learned are- there have obviously been numerous, but I think that the thing that I struck mostly by was that publishing a book, actually writing and creating and publishing a book is really just about a third of the work. The real work starts when you’re actually not published and you’ve gotta get that book out there. I should qualify that you start with that long before you even finish the book. Marketing and selling and promoting the book is a full-time job in some cases, and it’s a huge amount of work that goes well beyond just publishing a book because the publisher themselves- in my case, O’Reilly has been my publisher, their job is not to market the book for you even if it seems like it is, it’s not. They’re not gonna do that. Their job is to edit, print, and publish a book for you, and then their job is done. If you want it to be a success, you’ve got to put a lot of effort into it.

In a way, I didn’t put enough effort into the Design Leadership book, and I feel like that’s really good content that never really reached the market that it was supposed to reach. Product Leadership is exactly the opposite that we spent a lot of time thinking about how we were going to reach the audience that we wanted to reach. We were able to get to bestseller status immediately. That’s probably close to 10,000 books being sold.

I think you’ve got to spend time thinking about that, and that goes to every little detail like the cover design and the interior design and making sure you’ve got a list of people that you can reach out to before you even launch the book. Having hundreds of thousands of people on an email list that you can promote the book to, publishing little snippets of the book in medium and other forms to give people a taste of what’s to come. You’re not going to make millions of dollars selling a book. Certainly not this kind of business book, because there’s a limited audience. You’re lucky if you pay for a couple of nice meals with your family, and that’s it. The real reward is being able to reach a lot of people and have that conversation with those folks. We’ve had multiple webinars and dial-ins, kind of book discussion opportunities, where there’s this huge community of people who are talking about the content of the book and they’re engaged by it and they’re lives are changed by it, improved by it. That’s really the reward of that. It’s not the fact that you can upgrade your latte because you’ve got an extra $5 that week.

Jay Owen: Right. Ultimately that is my desire. I want to, hopefully, provide information both through the podcast and through the book that’s helpful to others and helps them grow. For me, I’m perfectly happy with the money that I make with the business. I don’t need the book to be a big moneymaker of any sort. It’s just an exciting venture that I feel like it’s time to do.

Richard: Yeah.

Jay Owen: It’s fun.

Richard: Well, good luck with that.

Jay Owen: Thank you so much. I really appreciate Richard being here today. Thanks for your time, sir. You’re full of knowledge and you’ve been really gracious with your time. If you’ve not already seen his books, make sure that you check ’em out. The newest of which is Product Leadership, and then make sure you also check out the Design Leadership book. Lots of great wisdom in there that really ties along with a lot of the things that we’re hitting on this show. Make sure to fill in your email address at buildingabusinessthatlasts.com if you want to be the first one to get a copy of the podcast, and then we’re also doing some prizes and giveaways there. Richard, thanks again for your time.

Richard: You’re welcome. Thank you.

Jay Owen: I hope this interview with Richard Banfield was helpful for you as it was for me. I really appreciated his transparency and rawness through a lot of the conversation with regards to things that have worked for him and things that haven’t. His insight and experience, years of experience, along with depth of conversations that he’s had with other business owners from around the world rally shines through. If you’d like to learn more about Richard and the business that he runs currently, you can check out freshtilledsoil.com online.

This podcast is sponsored by Design Extensions. Design Extensions is a full service digital marketing agency that provides marketing strategy, website, and design services that help others grow their business. If you’re looking for help in achieving your marketing goals, growing your business, improving your website, or upgrading your image, make sure to check out Design Extensions at designextensions.com.

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